SAMHAIN PROJECT, SEASON 6: MONKEY SHINES

 

SEASON 6

As anyone who reads this thing of mine would know, I'm a huge George A. Romero fan.  Big time.  And not just because of his "Living Dead" oeuvre, but plenty of others.  Frani and I just sat down to one I've long left unseen: Monkey Shines: An Experiment in Terror.  

Jason Beghe (fans of Chicago P.D. & the old HBO early series 1st & 10 are familiar) is in an accident and wheelchair bound at the outset.  He loses it all, including girlfriend Janine Turner in an early role, who is taken by his spinal surgeon, Stanley Tucci.  Early in Tucci's career, smarmy little shits were his specialty. For good reason, because he played them well, as evidenced by It Could Happen To You and Kiss of Death, especially.  

Beghe's character is set up with a live-in monkey to help him function independently.  This monkey is donated by close scientist friend, John Pankow, who is probably the strongest performer in the film.  Always a strong actor, from To Live & Die in L.A. to Mad About You, and more, this shouldn't be a surprise.  There's a love interest of a sort in Kate McNeil who trains Beghe's monkey.  (That sounds vaguely double entendre-ish).  This sometimes works and often doesn't.  She's charming enough, and many will recognize her from House On Sorority Row.  Her in depth, chuckling look back at that genre favorite in In Search of Darkness III is quite the hoot. 

What does work is Ella.  The monkey.  She does everything Beghe requires and more.  This little creature is as adorable as they come, and quickly wins over the viewer.  She falls in love with our leading man, and due to some sort of chemical treatment being applied by Pankow, a link between the two is formed.  Ella becomes jealous, angry and violent.  Along the way, so does Beghe.  It's not convincing however, because when he gets vicious, it looks like he's doing a bad Robert DeNiro impression. 

And also, as Frani pointed out, even when Ella is supposed to be imposing and intimidating, she is just too damn cute.  And the final confrontation results in the viewer really not being able to decide who's the real villain here.  Because adorable is adorable.  Oh, just keep trying to smother me with your monstrous, fuzzy love, you snuggly little antagonist, you!!

Overall, thanks to Romero's deft touch, the movie works.  It's an interesting concept for a horror film, and well-written by George himself.  I recommend it.  It may not be the maestro's finest hour, but it definitely fits nicely into the era where George had studio backing and some degree of freedom.  Sadly, this ended when the original Orion pictures went under and the still excellent The Dark Half wasn't able to completely cross the finish line.  Solid stuff from a man with an incredibly diverse resume. 

THE SAMHAIN PROJECT, SEASON 6: 10 SCARY NON-HORROR MOVIES

SEASON 6

Sometimes a movie is capable of scaring the shits out of you while not intending to exactly be frightening. I'm not talking about "disturbing", of course, because in this day and age there are a plethora of filmmakers who aim to only do that.  I'm talking about films with the capability of terrifying you by merely making you think...

Now there was a time people thought Idiocracy and The Day After Tomorrow were exaggeratory humor and science fiction at their most prime examples.  All, I can say is "Life Comes At You Fast, Bro". Because the government seems to be repeatedly stepping on rakes, and flashing stunning displays of self-dealing corruption.  With the weather being transformed into some sort of Frankenstein's climate monster due to those folks' indifference, neither film seems all that far off the mark anymore. 

Idiocracy has some things in the film that are just plain not funny anymore despite me howling in laughter at it almost 20 years ago.   And all those people calling Dennis Quaid's (serious irony there, innit?) warnings about the oncoming Whitley Streiber Superstorm "stupid movie pseudo-science" in The Day After Tomorrow, do you still want to hang on to that?

That's not where I'm going here today, but it's creating an extension to the "Scary even though..." genre.

Anyhoo.

1. Paradise Lost--Watching 3 teenagers being railroaded into life in prison or a lethal injection is terrifying.  The West Memphis 3 had it happen to them by a biased and discriminatory legal system and community.  However,  what happened to those little murdered boys is far worse, unfair, and disturbing beyond belief.

2.  Idiocracy--Yeah, it's a wackadoo comedy written and directed by Beavis and Butt Head and King of the Hill creator Mike Judge, but just think: If the morons of the world continue to reproduce at the current Jerry Springer rate, and smart people don't have time for kids, how off the mark is it really? Currently being proven out by Donald Trump and most of his supporters.

3: The Day After--It doesn't really hold up special effects-wise, but the build up to the button being pushed is undeniably creepy and tense. That poor woman, trapped in denial while trying to do laundry and fight off her husband's attempts to usher her into a shelter, is heart-rending.  From my knowledge, being pretty well read on the subject this film is fairly accurate.

 

 4. The Accused--Another standard legal system-gone amok movie, but the sequence where Jodie Foster is gang-attacked still haunts me to this day, and I refuse to watch it again.  A movie that made me somehow hate my gender and Leo Rossi simultaneously.  Men suck.

 

5. Trekkies--If you're a Star Trek fan, respect....really. But just like anything else pop-culture wise that you can be a fan of, some people take it to nausea-inducing levels of self-indulgence and hero-worship that exceeds even church-going zealotry.  Some of these people need help.  So many cringe-inducing moments.  Side Note: There's also a few moments in 25 Years of Terror where fans of the Halloween series are also shown in much the same light.  These people give me the creeps.

6.  Dopamine--A romantic comedy that poses the questions: what if love is just dopamine, and lust is just adrenaline?  Despite the saccharine ending, those questions posed by the movie chilled me to the very marrow of my bones. So it possessed me to ask my own question: Why are we doing this, then?

 7. Miracle Mile--The last 15 minutes of this movie show humanity at it's absolute worst, when knowledge that nuclear destruction is inevitable. I stared blankly at the screen for a good five minutes solid after the final frame, and couldn't sleep for days afterwords.  Yes, the atomic apocalypse would be awful, but somehow people would manage to one-up even that hideousness.

 8. Midnight Express--Please remind me to never, never, EVER, EVER try to smuggle heroin out of Turkey.

9. The Guyana Tragedy--Humanity's lemming mentality at its most pathetic and disturbing. Jesus Christ, this actually happened.  Learning of one person's ability to actually get people to willingly walk to their death literally scared the shit out of me.

10. Thirteen Days--The Cuban Missile Crisis and how close we actually came to flame-on. It's Goddamn eye opening to realize people who were gilded as one-time war-heroes also pushed for "collateral damage" actions and others agreed with them.  Thank the stars cooler heads prevailed, on both sides of the ocean.

SAMHAIN PROJECT, SEASON 6: URBAN LEGEND

SEASON 6

This has the stank of 90’s all over it:  Jared Leto, Alicia Witt, Joshua Jackson, Rebecca Gayheart, and Michel flippin' Rosenbaum.  Natasha Gregson Wagner pulls a Drew Barrymore at the outset.  However, a nice extended cameo by Robert Englund is pretty cool, and Brad Dourif is always welcome.  They both do their thing, whether wizened or creepy, and do it better than anyone else.

It also has that jumbly screeching string score that could be dropped into any horror film, or action film of the era, for that matter. 

What is cool however is the concept of a serial killer's use of urban legends as an M.O. to pick off students at a factionalized university.  However the film's execution is very bland.  Fitting the era, it contains the prototypical use of a whodunnit that doesn’t need anywhere near a Sherlock Holmes to figure it out. Here we have acting that’s very solid for a weak script.  That's a loss of balance that is felt from the first frame.

The direction is cut and pasted from Scream. 

What’s disturbing is the all too presciently written concept of angry people raging about violence on a college campus, which is being reflected in today’s headlines.  That's a bit unsettling, to say the least. 

Urban Legend has its moments, but it really won’t have the legs to go the distance and be considered a great Halloweener.

SAMHAIN PROJECT SEASON 6: ALONE IN THE DARK

SEASON 6

1982 was such a peak year they made a documentary about its cinematic wares.  I've got a future post coming up about that year.  I've alluded to it before, but I'll get there. 

That year was probably the apex of a genre that would go on for many more years.  Alone in the Dark probably wedges into it sideways.   There's no way in this day and age that a small indy studio could wedge the likes of Donald Pleasence, Martin Landau, Jack Palance and oh yeah, Dwight Schulz into a horror cheapie like New Line was able to here.  And the film works despite the odds against it.  Despite its cast and the effectiveness thereof, (no one phoned it in here, kudos to director Jack Sholder) its largely gone forgotten with the exception of a Scream Factory blu ray release. 

Pleasence runs a mental health facility with the style of the combination of a hippy love goon straight from the streets of Haight-Asbury and a potential patient himself.  His lack of respect for the dangerousness of the guys on the 3rd floor and dependence on electricity to keep them reigned in leads to the obvious when a two-day electrical blackout occurs.  Needless to say, our scary guys led by brick-house Jack Palance (who stayed that way until he passed away) and including Landau, looking a lot like a shark here, and a couple other psychotic chaps (Oops!  Let's not call them by that cold linguistic label.  Dr. Pleasence prefers to refer to them as "voyagers".  Yeah, let's go with that.)

All of this comes together nicely, performed well by everyone.  A surprisingly sharp turn by the actual protagonist, Schulz, is key here.   Some actual intentional laugh-out-loud flashes in the story, and that adds to the intrigue surprisingly well.  The script, penned by Sholder himself, is actually tight if tough to believe.  But this is an early 80's low-budget flick and credit must be given to the whole piece as a success. 

If you're looking for something off the beaten path this Halloween, you can probably do worse. 

Oh yeah, and a nice performance by the era's New York pseudo-punk outfit, The Sic F*cks.

SAMHAIN PROJECT, SEASON 6: BACKROOMS

SEASON 6

 

Who'd have thunk that a photograph of a yellow empty office area of a building, construction in progress, in Oshkosh, Wisconsin would be the prompt for such freakiness?

Chiwetel Ejiofor leads a mind-bending flick as a dude who pretty much steps in turd soup with his life decisions.  He regrets this aspect of his personality as he engages in it.  A would-be architect, albeit one who deals in furniture, has perhaps decided to take his quasi-underachiever nature out on everyone else. 

Until the universe comes along. 

He discovers a sliver of light peering back at him from the wall of a sub-floor section in his furniture dealership.  

Once Ejiofor literally slips into the backroom, Backrooms never lets up.  His melting aloofness gives way to a sweaty, out of control obsession as a result.

An eternal confection of a banana colored, horribly fluorescent lit, shag carpeted galaxy is laid out before him. Albeit one with things in it.  Living and inanimate. As he works his way through the labyrinthine expanse of awful Joe Versus the Volcano workspace devoid of work, the film starts to.....

collapse in on itself?

In a good way, bro. 

It's up to you to decide what exactly is going on here.  The movie provides enough line to satisfactorily trip over for your own answers to the questions presented.  As I've said in an annoyingly disclaimerish fashion;  I don't mind ambiguous endings, I hate nonsensical.

Youngster director Kane Parsons has delivered neither.  I loved watching Chiwetel Ejifor and his psychiatrist, played with sharp disassociation by Reinate Reinsve, approach the blurriness of existence from two different angles.  

An amazing score here that seems like Goblin fell into a quasar dish with Tangerine Dream and Boards of Canada make this shit even more creepy than it would have been anyway.  And that's pretty creepy

Mark Duplass also pops up here to put an unraveling tie-up on things that gives the film's denouement all that is left that it needs. Because in Backrooms, it's better to be a door than a window.

THE SAMHAIN PROJECT, SEASON 6: WHEN THE "HALLOWEEN" THING STARTED

SEASON 6

There’s a handful of movies out there I’ve seen so many times that I can tell you what the next cut is going to bring or what the next line of dialogue will be throughout the entire picture. Those movies fall into a very short list and they include: 

Halloween 

The Warriors 

Jaws 

Star Wars 

Back to the Future

Silent Rage (hee hee)

….among a few others. 

The first time I saw Halloween and The Warriors was a Friday night.  It was October 31, 1980.  Two of my sisters, Randee and Dee, shared a Racine, WI apartment where they used the television that I have in this picture below as their source of entertainment.  I spent the evening with my sister, Randee, some popcorn, and a pair of movies.  Randee took me out for burgers before we headed back to her apartment.  I was excited as I could be in that moment, as a lot of people had been talking about this Halloween movie for a long time. 

They couldn’t pick up a whole lot with that television, but they did subscribe to HBO with it. 

Yes, folks, as I recall, they subscribed to Home Box Office with this tiny 9 inch television.  Or at the very least, one just like it.  It doesn’t matter; it worked, and especially on Halloween night, 1980.   Randee and I watched The Warriors, followed by Halloween, both first time viewings for me.  That slightly grainy black and white picture may have lent both films something they needed for me in that moment. 

Also, Randee and I watched this pair of movies before I went to sleep, and I had some pretty intense John Carpenter-induced nightmares to say the least. But I’ll never forget that night.  A cinema breakthrough moment for my beginning years as a movie buff. 

It’s interesting how the descriptions that my mom‘s friends had given to me that month in relation to Halloween didn’t measure up to what was on the screen in John Carpenter‘s film. The main focus of that night was of course, Halloween, but I got an extra glimpse at the work of what would become my second favorite filmmaker,  Walter Hill,  and his cult curiosity, The Warriors.  The latter being an unexpected gem that Randee talked up before we watched. 

The former marked my autumns for the rest of my life.

The image quality of 9 inches of black and white television matters not.  Both movies struck a permanent chord.

Talk about scores.  My mind welcomed both John Carpenter's and Barry DeVorzon's orchestrations for the films.  Such great stuff, and they were an inspirational cinematic sparking for my 9 year old mind.  They rattled around the rafters of my head for weeks. 

                                            

                                            

The HBO guide's image selection and description for Halloween, as well as The Warriors up above remain a core memory. 

SAMHAIN PROJECT, SEASON 6: CAST A DEADLY SPELL

 

SEASON 6

There was something special about the HBO Original film.  I'm talking about the old school ones from the early 80's to the mid 90's.  Films like Blackout, Flashpoint, & The Park is Mine.  They had fair-sized budgets, included name performers as well as directors.   Sometimes they would have a small theatrical release or be a foreign-market original, like Fortress, but they felt to me like something exclusive.  Only myself and other HBO subscribers had access.  In a matter of years, most of them would be largely forgotten.

Last night Frani and I watched the dust-covered Cast a Deadly Spell.  This one, unlike the others I mentioned, is being carried by the HBO Max streamer.  I guess you could call this one a horror-noir.  It has all the noir trappings.  A private investigator who drinks like a fish and smokes like a chimney.  He wanders around 1948 Los Angeles consorting with police force members, unseemly types of all shapes and sizes, and of course, femme fatales.  All the while, cracking wise with sharply written dialogue. 

The only difference is that in this version of 1948 L.A., magic is everywhere and being used by any and all.  Except our hero, Lovecraft, being played with spark by the late great Fred Ward.  Ward is great, and the rest of the cast is game as well, and they include David Warner, Clancy Brown, and Julianne Moore. 

Martin Campbell, who may have one of the most underrated of the film industry's longest resumes, is the director who does a nice job balancing the noirish atmosphere mixed with something the genre normally doesn't fraternize with: the supernatural.

Ghoulish beasties of other dimensions abound, and great practical effects bring those to life, as well as makeup work.  Despite the genre mashup, all of that doesn't seem to intrude.  The weird blend of fantasy elements and hard-boiled mystery seems to makes sense in some strange way,  Cast makes you wonder if Max Landis had seen this film before writing Bright a few years back. 

Overall, the film is entertaining, with a handful of laugh-out-loud moments.   It has just enough of the supernatural horror for your average Halloween movie aficionado to chalk up on the list for this time of year. 

I was a bit surprised that after several gory scenes of mayhem and murder, to see Clancy Brown's "goddamn" had clearly been overdubbed with a "goldurn".  I'd much rather a young impressionable viewer hear that rather mind profanity, than see some of the bloodshed that came before it. 

Overall, I'd recommend it.  Kind of like a Hocus Pocus for the Crime Story set.